MediaPost: Videodubber Tries To Speak The Language Of International Content Creators

It’s one small global village, separated by a bunch of languages, but the new Videodubber hopes to find a business doing exactly what its name says.

Its technology can dub video into 30 languages and do a 90-minute video in as little as five minutes, says Boaz Rossano, the CEO, using automated voices that can sound pretty great, all things considered.

Rossano plans a big product introduction at the IBC show in Amsterdam Sept.11-16.

“Professional dubbing studios price a session [with] narration talent and a sound technician at more than a $1,000 for an hour of dubbed video. It can go higher in the U.S. — up to $3,000 per session–and lower in China or India,” Rossano said.

Videodubber is way cheaper than that. It charges less than $10 per minute, depending on the quality of audio format and the number of voices. There’s no studio, so you’re not paying for bricks and mortar.

In an email conversation with him in Israel, (comically, my own chat via phone with him in Israel was impossibly hard to hear), he explained the ins and outs of how Videodubber works.

Basically—very basically–Videodubber works with Acapela Group and Microsoft’s Test-to-Speech technology and Telco Interactive Voice Response applications. The content creator has to provide subtitle files to start the process going.

The company provides a movie dubbing platform that knows how to take a video and subtitles files and provide a dubbed movie. Videodubber has a patent on that.

Rossano says he’s aiming at content creators, “especially those who need to dub masses of content, or need to dub it quickly, like news or sports events.” Videodubbers voices work well with things like documentaries or cooking and other instructional-type programming.

The Videodubber engine, with its platform in the cloud, only needs time with the first dub. After that, all the other languages a user might want can be done even quicker. They are put on different channels, so a distributor can save time preparing it later for broadcast.

You can imagine glamorous uses for something like Videodubber, but Rossano can imagine some nuts-and-bolts applications, too.

“As video booms and YouTube exceeds Google in searches, I can see a company, like HP, dubbing all of its hardware training movies, to all of the languages of the markets they sell to. So next time you want to see how to replace your printer toner in Portuguese, you won’t need to use Google translate on the manual’s pages trying to crack what they meant, but rather see a simple training video on YouTube, walking you through it, step-by-step, in your own language… Wouldn’t that be awesome?”